Lines Are Drawn as 60's Radical Seeks Parole for an 80's Crime

By ROBERT WORTH

Published: August 20, 2001

Two decades after her name made headlines, Kathy Boudin's crime still reverberates -- as part of a killing that devastated a Rockland County neighborhood, and as a reminder of how powerful the fault lines of the 1960's remain.

On Wednesday, Ms. Boudin is scheduled to have a parole hearing for the first time since the day in October 1981 when, as a former member of the radical 1960's group the Weather Underground, she took part in an armed robbery that left a security guard and two police officers dead.

Ms. Boudin, in an interview last Tuesday at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, did not minimize her crime or guilt, but she and her supporters say her case should be judged, at least in part, on her good works in prison.

Still, many of her supporters conceded that separating her personal journey of repentance from the bitter memories of the killings and the radical politics that inspired them may be too much to ask.

''This case will never shed its symbolic loading,'' said Todd Gitlin, author of the 1987 book ''The 60's: Years of Hope, Days of Rage,'' who knew Ms. Boudin slightly in the decade's early years. ''It would take tremendous self-discipline on the parole board's part to ignore the political aura.''

On October 20, 1981, six armed gunmen from a radical group called the Black Liberation Army, a spinoff of the Black Panthers, stole $1.6 million in cash from a Brink's truck in Nanuet, N.Y., killing a guard. They transferred the money to a waiting U-Haul. Ms. Boudin, whose own group had disbanded some years earlier, was sitting in the cab. As the truck approached the New York State Thruway, the police stopped it, and Ms. Boudin got out and surrendered. The gunmen then burst out of the truck and opened fire, killing the two police officers before they were captured.

Today, her supporters say, Ms. Boudin is a different woman. During her 20 years in prison she has helped to create several innovative programs for AIDS victims, incarcerated mothers and inmates seeking to take college courses. Some of those programs are now national models.

In part because of her work in prison, she has hundreds of supporters, including several rabbis, ministers and priests, and a local group that has bought advertisements in a Rockland newspaper urging that she be released. They say that Ms. Boudin, who was not armed and was not at the scene of the robbery, has paid her debt to society.

Ms. Boudin said: ''I went out that day with a lot of denial. I didn't think anything would happen; in my mind, I was going back to pick up my child at the baby sitter's.''

She said that at the time of the robbery and shootout in Nanuet, her devotion to the political ideals that led her into the antiwar movement of the 1960's had been warped by over a decade of isolation. In 1970 she had gone underground, taking an assumed name after surviving an explosion in a Greenwich Village town house where other members of the Weather Underground had been making bombs.

''I was committed to a belief in changing the system as a way of helping people,'' she recalled. ''But my view of how to do that was so divorced from people and so abstract -- I wasn't dealing with people on a day-to-day level.''

She said several times that she felt a deep sense of regret and shame for having participated in the robbery. And she said she had long hoped to have a chance to apologize directly to the victims' families.

But those family members say that Ms. Boudin's apology -- and the time she has served -- are not enough. ''No matter what her role was, she was part of a planned terrorist attack,'' said Michael Paige, whose father, Peter Paige, a Brink's guard, was killed in the robbery. ''My family and the other families suffer every day for this.''

Rockland police and many of the victims' relatives have organized a campaign to persuade the parole board that she should never be released. Last month, off-duty police officers fanned out in supermarkets and malls in the county to get signatures on petitions opposing her parole, and State Senator Thomas P. Morahan offered his Web site for an e-mail petition. On July 13, the Rockland County executive, C. Scott Vanderhoef, and Sheriff James F. Kralik spoke at a rally attended by hundreds of police officers, relatives of the victims, and others opposed to her release. Also, Gov. George E. Pataki wrote to the relatives to express his opposition.

But at least one person who was affected by the crime disagrees with the opposition to parole.

On the day of the crime, Norma Hill watched in horror from her car as six gunmen burst from the back of the U-Haul and opened fire. One then ran up to her stopped car, held his gun to her head and yanked her from the seat. Ms. Hill, who said she was emotionally scarred by the event, became an important witness for the prosecution.

But years later, after her brother died of AIDS, she became a volunteer at the Bedford Hills prison, where many inmates had the disease. She did not know at first that Ms. Boudin was there. When they began working together, Ms. Boudin did not know Ms. Hill, having never seen her face at the trial. When Ms. Hill revealed herself, about seven years ago, they had a long and emotional conversation in which Ms. Boudin apologized for her role in the crime, Ms. Hill said.

Eventually they became close friends, and now Ms. Hill goes to the prison several times a month, sometimes bringing her granddaughter.

''Do we believe there can never be any change in a person?'' Ms. Hill asked. ''Kathy has led an exemplary life in prison. If I thought there was any possibility she would be a danger to society, I would not be saying this.''

Over the past two years, only about 5 percent of inmates convicted of second-degree murder in New York -- like Ms. Boudin -- have been paroled after their first hearing, said Thomas P. Grant, a spokesman for the State Division of Parole. The board has received more than 10,000 pieces of correspondence, including e-mail messages, about the case, with about 85 percent from people opposed to parole.

Like many other supporters, Ms. Hill said opponents were spreading an exaggerated account of the crime, damaging Ms. Boudin's chances for early release. Ms. Boudin was convicted of first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the death of Peter Paige, and was sentenced to 20 years to life behind bars. Her supporters point out that she was never charged in the deaths of the two police officers, who were killed after she stepped out of the U-Haul and surrendered.

But several Rockland police officials and some newspaper columnists have said that she deliberately helped murder the officers by persuading them to put away their guns.